A short word about California and cooking: I’m not much on cooking or even eating, in part because the lovely and saintly Mom Swaim is English, and so I grew up believing that food was meant simply to be endured. Eating was better than dying a wasting death. But everyone knows this bit of culinary wisdom: if you hope to boil a frog — and who doesn’t? — you must begin with a pot of cool water and a frog, and only gradually bring your amphibian to a boil. Otherwise, shocked by the change, your frog (who, the recipe/story goes, is still inexplicably alive) leaps from the pot. You know the fable and you know its underlying meaning: We humans are sometimes inattentive to important changes that unfold slowly around us. But there’s a counter-aphorism that applies to California’s political class, one summed up best, I think, by Hunter S. Thompson: When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. In California, the bizarre becomes common so quickly that we Californians are at risk of failing to notice that it’s getting hot in here. That’s how we get a press corps that obsequiously follows our governor into a forest still smoldering from rampaging/homicidal wildfire in order to faithfully and without skepticism report the governor’s claim that he’ll fight wildfires not with forest management but with electric-cars.
I ask you seriously to consider these similar examples from the week’s news. But first:
Today is St. Joseph’s Day, and on this day in 1974, then an eighth-grader at the Old Mission School in San Juan Capistrano (and even then a big mouth), I was hailed over the loudspeaker to attend the principal in her office. This was the very year in which our parish priest, a Father Somebody, I think, handed me a pair of man-sized boxing gloves and demanded that I settle my dispute with a Buick-sized classmate “in the way Lord Jesus intended.” Apparently, Jesus wanted me on my kiester, temporarily unable to suck oxygen from the atmosphere. I’m saying I lived in holy terror of men and women in black dresses. So, standing at the school’s main desk, eyeball to eyeball with Sister Aletha, our pocket-sized but nevertheless intimidating principal, I nervously heard these orders: I was to assist in the mission's chief annual public-relations event, the return each St. Joseph's Day of the famed swallows of Capistrano. Specifically, I was to help a formerly famous radio personality (a guy so old he was likely at Marconi’s elbow — see what I did there?!) broadcast the good news of the swallows’ miraculous arrival on March 19, the Feast of St. Joseph. You can read more about that experience here, but I’ll just note that I was then struggling to reconcile the competing claims of science and faith. Now I just sort of accept that they’re reconciled, especially in those situations where teacher union leaders claim they’ve got science on their side. Whether you believe as I do that miracles of nature are a reflection of a Creator’s genius and boundless creativity – a genius and creativity built into every one of us — isn’t really my point here. My point is that 2021 will proceed without the usual crowds of thousands of tourists who gather annually on March 19 at the Mission San Juan Capistrano, and who look expectantly at the sky, hoping to glimpse the infinite. Undeterred by international travel bans and social distancing requirements, the swallows are here now. Life goes on.
Unleash the Whackin’! Conceding that his recall appears headed to California’s voters, Gov. Gavin Newsom revealed his game plan: he will unleash the Kraken . . . of name-calling! (Note to self: A Kraken is a mythical, i.e., not real, creature.) In a brilliant National Review review of this Golden State gong show, reporter Jack Fowler says Team Newsom is working feverishly to connect Newsom’s critics to a vast right-wing conspiracy. As our Canadian brothers and sisters say about a scrap, a throw-down, an argy-bargy – a fight between hockey players on the ice – in this titanic tiltski, the gov’s union backers will dump tens of millions into his defense by dropping the gloves and going immediately on offense. Says Fowler, “Stop the Republican Recall casts Newt Gingrich, Devin Nunes, Mike Huckabee, and others as the bogeymen behind the [recall] effort. Attempting to set the narrative, he has added others to his cast of villains, especially QAnon, anti-vaxxers, and the Proud Boys. If the recall is a GOP affair, that’s news to its organizers, who say that over 30 percent of petition signers are registered Democrats or independents.”
Young Turks not jerks. Re: the role of liberals in the California recall, Ana Kasparian, executive producer and host of MSNBC’s left-leaning “Young Turks,” says she’s all for the Newsom Recall. Speaking on L.A.’s Fox affiliate, she said, “I have not seen competent leadership from Gavin Newsom, and I will state on this show, every single member of my family signed our names, provided our signatures, to recall him."
Next to the Pacific Ocean, the government union “cash sea” covers most of the earth’s surface: Newsom’s allies in the state’s powerful government unions bring in nearly $1 billion annually in union dues. And if, as progressives like to remind us, money equals political power, that billion bucks makes government union leaders the darkest dark force in California politics, “financial juggernauts,” as I told Fowler for the same National Review article when he asked me about prospects for defeating Gavin Newsom .” We can’t outraise the government unions. But we can cut their income.” That, Fowler writes, ”has led the California Policy Center and similar pro-freedom state groups to devise and implement a battle plan — replicated by conservatives in other states — that defends workers’ First Amendment rights and produces a de facto result of drying up the cash sea that Big Government Labor unions took for granted and depended upon.”
So, protecting the First Amendment rights of California’s government workers, helping them save an after-tax average of $800 per year, and defunding the unions destroying California — you’re asking how you can support that, am I right? Click on this button right here to help:
Speaking of vast right-wing conspiracies: If Donald Trump had uttered the sort of nonsense pouring from the bilge pumps beneath the teachers union HQ in Los Angeles, the media would rightly denounce it as anti-science propaganda designed to terrorize the public. Not so when it comes to L.A. teachers union president Cecily Myart-Cruz. Days before she announced a non-deal deal with district officials to return to in-person learning (about which more in a minute), United Teachers of Los Angeles officials were still telling the public that any call for in-person learning “is political. It is not science,” that getting teachers into classrooms is “putting families at risk of illness and death.” You know what’s political? A teachers union that claims to defend “communities of color” even as its year-long distance-learning experiment squeezes the ever-living life out of the district’s benighted kids (here, here and here). It’s political when Myart-Cruz ignores research showing that in-person learning doesn’t kill kids or spread the virus to teachers or their families (and please don’t make me list all the evidence to support my claim — here, here, here, here and here, for instance). What certainly hurts kids and what Myart-Cruz calls her “communities” is keeping schools closed — that and maybe the teacher unions’ handcrafted ethnic studies curriculum, to which we turn now.
lead their students in a series of indigenous songs, chants, and affirmations, including the “In Lak Ech Affirmation,” which appeals directly to the Aztec gods. Students first clap and chant to the god Tezkatlipoka—whom the Aztecs traditionally worshipped with human sacrifice and cannibalism—asking him for the power to be “warriors” for “social justice.” Next, the students chant to the gods Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli, and Xipe Totek, seeking “healing epistemologies” and “a revolutionary spirit.” … Finally, the chant comes to a climax with a request for “liberation, transformation, [and] decolonization,” after which students shout “Panche beh! Panche beh!” in pursuit of ultimate “critical consciousness.”
Let me defend the curriculum’s author, Los Angeles teacher and UTLA member R. Tolteka Cuauhtin: Chanting to the gods of the Aztecs, a people who carried out genocides against other indigenous Mesoamericans, may be the least weird of his ideas about public education. The goal of the courses he has imagineered is to help young Californians “to name, speak to, resist, and transform the hegemonic Eurocentric neocolonial condition” in a posture of “transformational resistance.” The ultimate goal, Cuauhtin says, is to engineer a "countergenocide.” Here’s a postcard depicting ritual human sacrifice in Central America under the Aztecs – wish you were here!
Teacher union leaders are messing with the wrong people: When they’re not depriving poor kids of a constitutionally guaranteed quality education or (which is the same thing) teaching them the upside of ritual murder, LA’s teacher union leaders are alienating their own base. Parents in Watts rallied to reopen schools over the weekend, and a liberal ally of CPC’s Parent Union sent us this fine piece of art, now circulating on social media — and suitable for framing if you live in the Haunted Mansion in Disneyland:
Teaching countergenocide on a credit card: What have our children and grandchildren bought in future taxes and unfunded liabilities for the public education they aren’t getting right now – and which is downright terrible when the schools are open? CPC’s Edward Ring does the number crunching and, including federal and state pandemic monies, concludes that California now spends about $25,000 per pupil. Exactly what are we getting for that money except for wasted lives and learning loss that will have a negative generational effect. Perhaps it’s time to re-imagine what public education means and how we should pay for it. Panche beh!
Hope and (learning) change: The San Francisco Unified School District is so far left that it has alienated the city’s lefty Mayor London Breed. The last adult in the room (if the others in attendance are teachers union leaders and the school district politicians they got into the room) Breed has already sued the district to reopen San Francisco schools. The need, says Breed, is for speed – learning loss, especially among poor kids. Not so fast, say district officials, who find the words “learning loss” hurtful. They offer this alternative: “learning change.” Taking their cue, I’m launching a new line of greeting cards that I call "Sorry for Your Change." Laid off? Terminal medical diagnosis? Victim of countergenocide? Yeah, I'm deeply sorry for your change. That makes it all better, right?
Road to Nowhere: Not talking here about California’s unfinished/surpassingly dumb high-speed rail or the Talking Heads’ strangely prophetic 1985 hit that just has to be about the utopian impulse in California’s lefty politics (“Well, we know where we're goin' / But we don't know where we've been”?!). In a state whose public officials believe they can turn facts upside down with a word change (“learning change”!), we often can’t get the little things right — things like maintaining Pacific Coast Highway. Yes, this is the Washington Post, so there are predictable genuflections to climate change. But there’s a larger and compelling question here about the cost of keeping up an iconic roadway built like a goat path along the rugged NorCal coast. Please consider this eulogy to Highway 1, what those of us down here in South OC, at least, call “PCH.”
Bad things happen when politicians intervene in the marketplace — and I no longer call these things “unintended consequences” because they’re utterly predictable. Consider this example from Los Angeles, where county supervisors and L.A. city officials decided that grocery store workers are heroes deserving a $5-per-hour pay increase they call “hero pay.” Saying the mandatory pay bump is unsustainable, grocery store chains announced the closure of three stores in poor neighborhoods where calling something “hero pay” doesn’t suspend the laws of gravity or business.
Hooray for the free market: You don’t have to love rap, hip-hop, dance or rock, but you gotta love the power of America’s free market to generate products that upset Iranian security forces. In 2019, Iranian officials whipped young people who recorded themselves dancing to Pharrell’s “Happy.” What has Iranian officials pegged this month? California artist Sasy’s “Tehran Tokyo.” The song’s video, which reportedly features adult film stars in (fairly) non-provocative situations, is sweeping Iran. Security forces there have responded with whips – and negative reviews. “Not as good as Dre,” one official did not write on Facebook.
Tiers for Fears: If you’re looking for an arbitrary and capricious state government program, look no further than the governor’s ever-changing reopening plan for the state. After going through multitudinous changes and adaptations, Newsom’s goal posts are still on wheels as local districts and teacher unions stall serious reopening plans. CPC researcher Brandon Ristoff takes a look at the policy shifts and ever-changing numbers they relate to schools and businesses reopenings.
Telling stories of government incompetence and overreach: On Wednesday, CPC’s Lance Christensen did what he loves to do, tell eager undergraduates about the reality of public policy and politics in California. His audience, students in UC Berkeley’s Cal-in-Sacramento program, might have benefitted from hearing Lance describe his real-world experiences in the state legislature and how he’s using that horror show to inform his work at CPC. He did not coat his views with sugar or sugar substitutes: the majority party has dominated California governance for the last 70 years, and every public policy challenge we’re now facing could have been dealt with over any one of the last several decades, but they weren’t, and so our challenges in every facet of public life is demonstrably worse. Further, government unions have upped the ante and intransigence has become their middle name. The hour passed quickly but we heard that the student debrief after his Zoom presentation was “very stimulating.” That’s good, right?
EdChoice makes the case for reform: Last night, CPC’s Parent Union hosted a statewide Zoom meeting with Brian McGrath and Mike McShane from EdChoice. Lots of conversation on the future of education. Brian reviewed a selection of the numerous bills other state legislatures are seriously considering to make school choice a real choice for parents and students. The pandemic has revealed the desire across the ideological spectrum to consider alternatives to our government’s factory schools, including hybrid homeschooling, pods and microschooling. Until there is enough political change to open up school choice opportunities wholesale in California, Parent Union is providing tools for parents to get the most for their children’s education. It doesn’t cost anything to join and the benefits are great!
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Will Swaim is the President of California Policy Center and co-host of National Review's Radio Free California podcast.
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The California Policy Center promotes prosperity for all Californians through limited government and individual liberty.
